Tonight we had a special edition of the Western Mass. Developers’ Group as Rich Hickey made the long trek north to talk to us about Clojure, his functional Lisp dialect that runs on the JVM.
I enjoyed Rich’s presentation a lot. He’s clearly a very smart guy with very focused goals for the language. He breezed through the basic Clojure intro stuff to get to slides and a demo app focused specifically on concurrency issues.
I just wanted to post a quick note for anyone who is in my region and interested in functional programming that the Western Mass. Developers Group is hosting a presentation by Rich Hickey, creator of the Clojure language, on March 20th.
This event was put in motion by Lou Franco, who is doing a “20 days of Clojure” series on his blog in the days running up to the event. Chas Emerick has arranged the meeting space.
Another successful session of non-stop technical chatter in the back of our favorite chain restaurant. Links and commentary:
The Talk Like a Pirate Day site was a victim of its own success this year. After several hours of record-breaking traffic, Chris nobly disabled the site to protect paying customers on the server. I’m looking forward to the white paper, “How to serve one million unique visitors one day per year”. We also heard the origin story of Talk Like a Pirate Day and the site.
The biweekly Western Massachusetts Developers Meeting was small tonight, but still high-quality. Topics in our typically rambling discussion included:
Are crawlers from some search engines following links embedded in Javascript (i.e. Ajax) code? And if so, what’s the use? What should Chas use for a CMS? (I don’t think any conclusion was reached; the two leading contenders seem be “build it in Django” or “just use Drupal”.) I do appreciate the argument that sometimes it’s good to think of yourself as a regular ol’ “business user” rather than someone who custom-develops everything just because he can.
I was only there for about half of the latest Western Mass. Developer Group meeting, but here are some of the things we rambled on about. Someone else will have to fill the earlier bits.
Haskell: Should you bother? That hot new band, Lambda and the Calculus If you’re learning Python, learn to love the interactive shell and the dir command Good introductory Python books: Core Python, Learning Python Good intro to Python for experienced programmers: Dive into Python Just how many tests have you written today?
Often after one of our Western Mass. Developer Group meetings I want to make a list of things we talked about. This time I actually did it. This only includes stuff I talked about or was within earshot of – minus the top secret material that you can only know about if you show up in person.
C# structures and their fans and detractors BASIC Computer Games, the book the Amiga and “guru meditation”.
